My Books

Monday, February 19, 2018

The above title is the subtitle of
Richard Rothstein’s recent book, The
Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
(Liveright: 2017). It is a book that both fascinated and infuriated me. That is
because the myth that most Americans have been fed, especially by the Supreme
Court in its school-desegregation rulings, is that most segregation in America is
de facto—that is, the result of
established housing patterns that were the unintentional
product of economic or cultural choices—and
therefore legitimate. Opposed to this is de
jure segregation—that carried out purposely by government policies, and
therefore, illegal. What Richard Rothstein sets out to demonstrate in stunning
detail, is the fact that segregation in American housing was, in fact, “a
nationwide project of the federal government in the twentieth century” (xii). Basically,
de jure from top to bottom. That is
to say, federal, state and local governments all unconstitutionally denied to
African Americans the right and the means to live in integrated neighborhoods,
thus creating the racist system of unequal schools, neighborhoods, suburbs and
central cities that we see in the United States to this day. What is perhaps
most astonishing is that it was not just the former Confederate states that
have been responsible for this, but the most liberal governments of the last
century like the Roosevelt administration.

Consider
one of the chief culprits in this story, the FHA or Federal Housing Administration
created by Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1934 to help solve the housing and banking crisis
of that time. What the FHA did was to insure bank mortgages covering 80% of a
home’s purchase price, thus removing much of the risk of default from shaky
banks. Grand idea. But the FHA required the appraisal of any property it
insured, and its “standards included a whites-only
requirement” (64), allegedly because it judged that properties in
racially-mixed neighborhoods would be too risky to insure. Rothstein cites from
the FHA’s Underwriters Manual:

“If a neighborhood is to retain
stability it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the
same social and racial classes. A change in social or racial occupancy
generally leads to instability and a reduction in values” (65).

The same government manual warned appraisers
against the “infiltration of inharmonious racial or nationality groups” and
against areas where children are “compelled” to attend schools with pupils from
“lower level(s) of society,” code for African Americans. Now it should be said
that Franklin Roosevelt was under severe constraints to get his New Deal
legislation passed, most specifically from southern Democrats who were
determined, the Civil War notwithstanding, to maintain segregation in America;
so he was forced to tailor New Deal legislation so that it would pass this
congressional roadblock. But it is nonetheless stunning to realize that, in
spite of the Fourteenth Amendment and several Supreme Court decisions against
both public and private laws or covenants imposing racial segregation, the U.S.
government created both the FHA and the earlier HOLC (Home Owner’s Loan
Corporation) that, in effect, either maintained or created new segregation in the United States. The HOLC, for
instance, formed in 1933 to take over existing mortgages subject to foreclosure
(as many were in the Depression), and issue new mortgages to save homeowners
and banks from ruin, started the practice of assessing “risk” in neighborhoods
where it intervened. It used real estate agents to assess these risks, and since
these agents had to abide by their ‘national ethics code to maintain
segregation,’ the HOLC ended up considering the racial composition of all
neighborhoods, and thereby created the “color-coded maps of every metropolitan
area in the nation,” with “safe” neighborhoods colored green, and “risky”
neighborhoods colored red. Again, “risky” and “red” are clear codes for “Black,”
leading directly to the practice of “redlining” that has persisted to this day.

Rothstein
provides endless examples of how this government-sponsored segregation worked
in practice. To begin with, it should be noted that in the post-war years, both
the FHA and the VA (Veteran’s Administration) were insuring fully “half of all
new mortgages nationwide,” so their influence was huge. Consider a 1958 case,
in my former Berkeley neighborhood, the Elmwood, where a teacher named Gerald
Cohn purchased a house with an FHA-guaranteed mortgage; but since he wasn’t quite
ready to move in, he rented it to a fellow teacher, Alfred Simmons, who was
black. This so alarmed the chief of police, that he inquired “how Mr. Simmons
had managed to get into this all-white community” (66) and notified the FBI.
Though the FBI and the US Attorney refused to prosecute (perhaps because they
understood the Constitution), the FHA was not so kind; it blacklisted Mr. Cohn,
informing him that “he would be denied the benefits of participation in the FHA
insurance program” ever again. For this was clear FHA policy: no mortgage guarantees to African Americans
or even to whites who tried to rent or sell to African Americans. When we
consider another case, involving the iconic suburban development called
Levittown on Long Island, we can see what this meant. Vince Mereday was a U.S.
Navy veteran of WWII, honorably discharged. Working after the war for his uncle
Robert who had a contract to deliver building materials to Levittown but
couldn’t buy there, Vince decided, as a Black veteran with a solid job, to try his
luck in buying a Levittown home. Veterans who bought in this way could buy a
three-bedroom home for $8,000, with no
money down, thanks to the low-interest VA and FHA-guaranteed loans. But
there were racist restrictions in these government programs: no insured
mortgages for developments that included any African Americans. Indeed, developers
could not even get loans to begin
developments until they assured banks that their new suburbs would be racially
segregated. Unsurprisingly, Vince Mereday was turned down, and had to settle
for an alternative: a home in nearby Lakeview, an all-black suburb near
Levittown. It cost him, like all African Americans deprived of FHA loans; for
he had to make a large down payment, get an uninsured mortgage from a bank, and
that meant a far higher interest rate and monthly payment. This became a
pattern nationwide, not least in the suburban subdivisions that, after the war,
completely changed the American landscape. Entire suburbs throughout the nation,
thanks to FHA requirements, became racially-exclusive white enclaves. Indeed,
Rothstein shows how “the growth of California and the West in the decades
following World War II was financed on a racially-restricted basis by the
federal government” (73). Developments in Milpitas CA, Westlake south of San
Francisco, Lakewood south of Los Angeles and Panorama City in the San Fernando
Valley were all FHA-guaranteed whites-only
projects. And where, as outside of St. Louis, a developer did create a subdivision for African
Americans, he could not get FHA financing. The result was that

the construction was shoddier and the
house design skimpier than in St. Ann (the developer’s previous all-white
project guaranteed by FHA). Because potential buyers were denied FHA or VA
mortgages, many homes were rented (73-4).

And, as Rothstein explains
elsewhere, having to scramble to make rent or mortgage payments, many African
Americans resorted to renting out rooms or crowding more family members into
homes, thus creating conditions that led to deterioration—for which they were and
still are, routinely blamed. In summary, the federal government’s programs
designed to help Americans become homeowners, specifically applied only to whites, and this, in turn, “spurred the
suburbanization of every metropolitan area by guaranteeing bank loans to
mass-production builders who would create all-white subdivisions that came to
ring American cities” (75), leaving inner city neighborhoods to deteriorate. In
response, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights came to this conclusion:

the
“housing industry, aided and abetted by Government, must bear the primary
responsibility for the legacy of segregated housing…Government and private
industry came together to create a system of racial segregation” (75).

Unfortunately,
and infuriatingly, this was only the beginning of a continuing, and
still-existing system of racial segregation in the United States of America.
Rothstein’s book is full of more details—zoning laws that forced industries,
often polluting industries, to settle in African American neighborhoods, literally
creating unhealthy slums; routing interstate highways to create racial
boundaries or condemn African American neighborhoods altogether; turning a
blind eye to racist mobs rioting in response to attempts by African Americans
to buy into segregated neighborhoods (in one instance in a Louisville KY
suburb, there were cross burnings and bombings but no indictments of the
rioters until a grand jury indicted the
sellers, Carl and Ann Braden, for “conspiring to stir up racial conflict by
selling the house to African Americans” and sentenced Mr. Braden to fifteen
years in prison for his “crime,” until he won release on appeal), and using the
tax code to add to the already-overwhelming burden African Americans had to
face in trying to own a home. It is a story that casts in an entirely new light
upon the constant criticisms of deteriorating and high-crime neighborhoods (recall
the racist remarks candidate Donald Trump made about inner-city slums), because what
it demonstrates is that these “deplorable conditions” were essentially created
by government fiat and business policies (such as private covenants that
excluded sales to African Americans). When one adds the concerted legal
maneuvering to deprive African Americans of anything approaching the job
opportunities available to whites (the minimum wage laws were deliberately created
[again, at the behest of southern Democrats] to exclude jobs in agriculture and
domestic service-- jobs typically held by African Americans), one begins to
wonder how any person of color ever manages to survive at all.

Let
me cite one more case from Rothstein’s book, this one involving the Techwood
Homes in Atlanta, opened in 1935. This was a project of the Public Works
Administration (PWA), which, despite its good intentions, “segregated projects
even where there was no previous pattern of segregation” (21). Amazingly, the
head of the new PWA was Harold Ickes, a former president of the Chicago branch
of the NAACP. Nonetheless, though he ensured that the PWA did build publicly-financed homes for African Americans, he
maintained segregation as the PWA's dominant mode (of 47 projects, 17 were for
African Americans, while 21 were for whites only). In Atlanta, this meant that
the Techwood Homes, built on “land that was cleared by demolishing the Flats, a
low-income integrated neighborhood
adjacent to downtown that had included 1600 families, nearly one-third of whom
were African American” (22), became a project with 604 units for white families only. This was bad
enough. But what the PWA project did was to force low-income African American
families out of the formerly-integrated Flats into the only places they were
allowed: overcrowded “neighborhoods where African American were already living.”
This meant doubling up with relatives or renting rooms made available by other
African Americans subdividing their houses. Rothstein summarizes the effect of
this program ostensibly meant to alleviate inadequate housing for lower and
middle-income families:

A
result of the government program, therefore, was the increased population
density that turned the African American neighborhoods into slums (22).

Think about it: the federal
government’s program not only turned what had been an integrated neighborhood
into a whites-only project, but, as a direct result of its efforts, made
existing African American neighborhoods worse, turning them into slums.

Such is the legacy
of racism and segregation in the United States of America. It is a tale that,
despite making one ashamed of being American, should be studied by everyone,
not least the allegedly well-informed members of our Supreme Court, our
Congress, our White House, and certainly, the children in all of our schools.

Thursday, February 1, 2018

We sleep so much of our life—fully
one-third of our time is spent sleeping—that you would think any human knows
all there is to know about it. But the truth is that until very recently, we
had no real idea of why sleep was so ubiquitous across all species, or so
necessary (deprive any human of sleep for a substantial period of days or weeks
and that human will first hallucinate and eventually die). To many, it seemed
to be this bothersome waste of time: why sleep when one could be doing so many
interesting or profitable things? Indeed, that attitude, especially in advanced
industrial nations, is one of the reasons Matthew Walker wrote his recent book,
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of
Sleepand Dreams (Scribners:
2017). Walker, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley,
considers the lack of sleep in modern society a virtual epidemic that has
enormous consequences to our national and global well-being. His book is
therefore full of fascinating details and studies informing us why sleep is so
necessary, and which kind of sleep is necessary for which functions.

Begin
with what almost everyone now knows: there are two different kinds of sleep for
humans—deep or NREM sleep, and REM or rapid-eye-movement sleep. This discovery
(by Aserinsky and Kleitman) came in 1952, but what the explosion of
neuroscience since then has now revealed is why each type of sleep is
necessary, when it usually occurs during the night, and why missing it has the
damaging effects it does. First the basics: there are five cycles in the
average person’s night of sleep, each lasting about 90 minutes. In each cycle,
we go from being awake to REM sleep to four ever-deeper levels of NREM sleep,
and then start over, with the average cycles lasting from 11PM to 12:30, 12:30
to 2, 2 to 3:30, 3:30 to 5:15 and 5:15 to 7AM. These 90-minute cycles change in
composition through the night, with most of the early cycles consumed by
deep NREM sleep and very little REM sleep, but then changing to REM sleep
domination later, especially in the last cycle just before we wake for the day.
What’s explained here is how the functions of the two types of sleep differ.
NREM sleep—marked by slow, synchronous brain waves—does the work of “weeding
out and removing unnecessary neural connections” (45). That is, our brains are
filled with outside input during the day, and could be overwhelmed if they
retained all that information. NREM sleep seems to do what Walker calls the
“excavatory” work of ridding the brain of what’s not necessary and storing the parts
that are, and it does it early in the night. Then, in the later part of the
night, the REM sleep in which we dream plays a role in integrating the new connections
that are left. Walker calls this the “etching hand of REM sleep,” which
“blends, interconnects, and adds details…to auto-update our memory networks
based on the events of the day” (45). REM sleep, in short, is the active time
of sleep, with parts of the dreaming brain 30 % more active than when we are
awake (though it should be pointed out that the brain is quite active during
NREM sleep too). This activity is also the reason that a key part of REM sleep
is body paralysis: you can’t move while dreaming because if you could, you
might act out your dream and that could prove dangerous, as it sometimes is for
sleepwalkers. Walker summarizes the various brain states as follows:

When it comes to information
processing, think of the wake state as reception
(experiencing and constantly learning the world around you), NREM sleep as reflection (storing and strengthening
those raw ingredients of new facts and skills), and REM sleep as integration (interconnecting those raw
ingredients with each other, with all past experiences, and, in doing so,
building an ever more accurate model of how the world works.) (53).

Walker
underlines the importance of REM sleep to human evolution by theorizing that
when primates moved from tree sleeping to ground sleeping, they could do more
REM sleep without fear of falling. This meant that the increased dream time fostered
both human cognitive intelligence and our ability to navigate socially complex
groupings. That is, REM-sleep dreaming increases our ability to “successfully
navigate the kaleidoscope of socioemotional signals” characteristic of human
culture, and thus “forge(s) the types of cooperative alliances that are
necessary to establish large social groups and societies” (74). REM sleep is
also the key to human creativity, according to Walker, as the ability of dreams
to combine all sorts of irrational elements seems to prove. Finally, for
Walker, dreams have a much more specific function than that theorized by Freud.
Nurturing to our emotional and mental health, dreams allow us to process
emotional themes and concerns too fraught for the daytime brain. That is partly
because during REM sleep, the stress-related chemical noradrenaline (or
noepinephrine) is shut off. That means the brain can deal with an upsetting
memory more calmly, in what Walker calls a “safe dreaming environment.” He even
theorizes, based on the work of colleagues, that REM-sleep dreaming
accomplishes two goals:

first, to remember the details of those valuable,
salient experiences, integrating them with existing knowledge and putting them
into autobiographical perspective; and second, to forget, or dissolve, the visceral, painful emotional charge that
had previously been wrapped around those memories (208).

If this is true, thought Walker, then these ideas might be
extended to PTSD, as his communication with Dr. Murray Raskind, of Seattle
Veteran’s Hospital, suggested. Raskind found out by chance that a drug called prazosin he was using to treat patients with
high blood pressure had an unexpected side effect: it suppressed noradrenaline
in the brain, and thereby “alleviated reoccurring flashback nightmares” (213). This
confirmed Walker’s intuition that REM sleep allows the dreaming brain to
detoxify painful experiences by reliving them in a more stress-free setting
than when awake.

One other
revelation, among many, is worth mentioning. Sleep turns out to be a great
space for learning, from specific facts to motor skills. The key
neuroscientific fact here is that learning during sleep seems mainly to be
fostered by “sleep spindles.” These are pulses that repeat every 100 to 200
milliseconds, moving back and forth between the hippocampus (where short-term
memory is stored) and the longer-term memory sites in the cortex. Here is how
Walker describes this key discovery:

In that moment, we had just become
privy to an electrical transaction occurring in the quiet secrecy of sleep: one
that was shifting fact-based memories from the temporary storage depot
(hippocampus) to a long-term secure vault (the cortex). In doing so, sleep had
cleared out the hippocampus, replenishing this short-term information
repository with plentiful free space…the learning of new facts could begin again,
anew, the following day (111).

Moreover, learning during sleep aids
more than the mental compiling of facts. The “offline learning” of sleep also
aids motor memory, such as that required by athletes or musicians. A musician
Walker met told him of his experiences in this regard, which happened
routinely:

“As a pianist, I have an experience
that seems far too frequent to be chance. I will be practicing a particular
piece, even late into the evening, and I cannot seem to master it…I go to bed
frustrated. But when I wake up the next
morning and sit back down at the piano, I can just play, perfectly” (124).

Numerous experiments, both in
Walker’s laboratory and elsewhere, have now proven this capacity of sleep to be
correct. In one test of learning odd number sequences, for example, one group
was given time off from practicing during the day, with no sleep; the other
half was given the same amount of time off, but at night when they could sleep.
The group that was given a daytime break without sleep showed no improvement
after twelve hours. But the group that had slept overnight “showed a striking
20 percent jump in performance speed and a near 35 percent improvement in
accuracy” (125). This same result has been duplicated many times, and most
people would probably confirm something like it in their own experience. This essentially
means that the old admonition of “sleep on it” has now been confirmed
scientifically: it is not practice alone that makes perfect, but that old
standby, sleep.

There
is lots more in this invaluable book, but this should give you the idea. Walker
is a missionary in our world whose message concerns both the damnation that
comes from sleep deprivation (for teenagers, drivers, doctors, workers of all
kinds), and the salvation that derives from what should be the simplest of our
activities: a good night’s sleep.

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About Me

Lawrence DiStasi has worked as a writer, editor, teacher and historian since graduating from Dartmouth College (BA) and New York University (ABD). He has taught literature and composition at Gettysburg College, the University of California at Berkeley, and most recently in the Fall Freshman Program at UC Berkeley Extension. Since 1994, he has been project director of the historical exhibit, Una Storia Segreta: When Italian Americans Were "Enemy Aliens," shepherding it to more than fifty sites nationwide, and spearheading the movement it generated to pass "The Wartime Violation of Italian American Civil Liberties Act", signed into Public Law #106-451 by President William Jefferson Clinton. His published books include: MAL OCCHIO: The Underside of Vision (North Point Press: 1981), Dream Streets: The Big Book of Italian American Culture (Harper & Row: 1989), and Una Storia Segreta: The Secret History of Italian American Evacuation and Internment during World War II (Heyday Books: 2001). He lives in Bolinas, CA.